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Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That in a Small Town’ hits #1 as professor claims song uses ‘coded’ anti-black lyrics

August 4, 2023 | | Print Article

Country music star Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Thursday, becoming the #1 country music song in the nation.

His wife Brittany Aldean celebrated on social media while rubbing it in somewhat that the cancel culture crowd’s efforts backfired.

She wrote, “Well, yesterday was a monumental day for @jasonaldean ❤️ #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart!! …A career first That sure did backfire, didn’t it?? The best fans EVERRRR❣️❣️❣️❣️”

The supposedly “controversial” song targeted “woke” Black Lives Matter protestors who burned and rioted in the streets of America after the 2020 death of drug addict George Floyd while in police custody, warning that their behavior would not be tolerated in rural America. For that reason, the progressive left hit him with the “racist” label and even ridiculously claimed that the song was “pro-lynching.”

(In the music video, Aldean is performing in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., which was the site of the lynching of an 18-year-old black man in 1927.)

On that note, The Hollywood Reporter ran a hit piece this week claiming Aldean released the song to appeal to Trump supporters and trotted out a liberal professor who claimed the song used coded “anti-blackness” lyrics — the irony here is that the  Marxist-inspired left wrote the book on using code words to manipulate language.

Don Cusic, a professor of music business at Belmont University, pushed the prerequisite Trump angle.

“I felt that Jason Aldean was expressing the feelings that a lot of people in the country audience felt, particularly in the Trump America country audience,” the country music historian said. “The video was just in your face — it was in your face anger, and that just reinforced that anger that is in so much of America today, that big division.”

Cusic also said that he’s not surprised there’s so much support — see white people — for Aldean’s song “because there’s a dark side to this country.”

Philip Ewell, a professor of music theory at Hunter College, covered the anti-blackness angle.

“Right now, in 2023, we’re having these massive disagreements about race and what role it’s played in the history of our country. And in music, it plays out in these extremely subtle ways sometimes. It’s hard to deny some of these embedded stereotypes,” he said. “I’ve listened to some of Jason Aldean’s music — I think he’s a pretty good artist. But it’s just something that kind of comes out in culture, anti-Blackness. Because it’s part of the founding of our country. We shouldn’t run away from that simple fact.”

“Anybody really should understand that there’s a strong racial undertone to these lyrics,” Ewell added. “Race is part of the lyrics. I think that’s pretty clear.”

Not through by a long shot, the professor then spoke of “coded language” while hitting Aldean for including white rioters.

“What upsets people is the coded language and coded pictures. You got a guy with a hoodie in a violent act, but it could have been a white guy; white guys wear hoodies too. But the implications go far beyond. And if you’re Black, you’re looking at that video a whole lot differently than if you’re white,” Cusic said. “And that’s the dividing factor. Even though I think Aldean was careful, or the production company was careful to have whites in pictures of riots as well as implying Blacks as part of the division in this country, people in the metropolitan areas are looking at it differently than the rural areas. People who are Trump supporters are looking at it a lot differently than intelligentsia.”

The THR hit piece also included this zinger:

But the star has also been a controversial figure while being a chart-topping singer. In 2015, Aldean dressed as Lil Wayne for Halloween, wearing blackface and a wig of long black dreadlocks. He publicly cheated on his ex-wife Jessica Ussery in 2012 with current wife Brittany Aldean, apologizing for the PDA by saying he “had too much to drink, let the party get out of hand and acted inappropriately at a bar.” And Brittany Aldean has had her share of mishaps, including recent transphobic comments that got her husband dropped by his longtime public relations firm.

 

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Tom Tillison
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